VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: For contributing some of their funding to the Hamas organization in Palestine for relief work in Gaza and the West Bank portions of Palestine, the officers of the Holy Land Foundation have been sentenced to up to 65 years in prison! They will join there the Cuban Five and other political prisoners in the USA serving excessively long sentences under harsh conditions. Remember, the US soldiers caught torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reservists whose regular employment was in the civil prisons in the USA, including in my own state of Maryland.

• A goon squad is a regular feature of US prisons and its members take particular pleasure in the physical and psychological torment of those they deem enemies of the military state.

It is time for the rest of the world to pay particular attention to the deficiencies and to the regular and institutionalized cruelty of the US injustice system.

With just six percent of the world's population, the USA's gaols contain not less than twenty-five percent of the world's prisoners. And yes, we also hold some of the oldest politicals in the world as well. People from the Black Panther Party, from the Weatherman Underground remain incarcerated under trumped-up charges 40 years and more. Makes what happened to Nelson Mandela seem like nothing.

Most of the international agencies like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International are very cautious about commenting on the empire's despicable and enormous prison industrial complex. The largest since Stalin's time. One must speculate on the causes of this silence. Perhaps they rely too much on funding from official and private sources in the USA and hope to avoid offense to their patrons. Many nations have regulations limiting the incarceration of youth or the elderly. These do not exist in the USA. Other nations limit the incarceration of mothers with young children. Some even permit the children to remain with their mothers. This is not done in the USA.

ALL modern nations have at least some political prisoners. But in many such persons are not exposed to the worst in prison -- violence from either staff or real criminals, often instigated by staff. In the worst days of the late Irish troubles, for instance, the British allowed IRA members their own clothing and kept them separated from civil criminals. This is not so in the USA.

• And of course, sentences such as that of sixty-five years mentioned above are nearly unheard of elsewhere in the world save for the most heinous of murders.

Racism is quite rampant in US prisons -- eighty percent of prisoners in Maryland are Black!

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian writer, described how Stalin's camps grew so large and covered so much of the national territory of the USSR that special railcars had to be built for the transport of the prisoners. He described the use of the lorries of the Moscow State Bakery for the carrying of prisoners. But the USA is number one -- our Bureau of Prisons even has its own airline!

When Bolivarian officials are attacked by their US enemies for some abuse of the opposition in Venezuel